Writer, director, and star of You, Me, and Everyone We Know, Miranda July is a multi-disciplinarian, who threads together film, fiction, monologue, and performance art. Her 2011 movie, The Future, was nominated for a Golden Bear at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival. She published her first novel, The First Bad Man, in 2015.

Below are Miranda July’s favorite books, available to purchase as a set or individually.

Jim Goldberg

The format of this book is part of what makes it so great — that the subjects, very rich people and very poor people, got to see Goldberg’s portrait and write a sentence upon looking at themselves. It’s easy to objectify a subject — but also really easy to simply invite them to speak.

Nina Berberova and Marian Schwartz

I don’t even know how I came across this book, but I read the title story every few years and just feel SO SAD. I thought my life would slip right through my fingers as it did for this narrator, and though it hasn’t…it also has. Super Russian.

Friedl Kubelka Vom Groller, Melanie Ohnemus, Andrea Picard

I got this book a couple years ago and since then two people have bought it for me — and they are right to! The very specific, imperfect femininity — the sense of one woman’s struggle to make art — that’s my bailiwick.

Phoebe Gloeckner

I was in a unique position to be influenced by this book because my parents published it when I was in my twenties (long before Marielle Heller made it into a great movie). It is the most graphic of all the graphic novels I own — and all from the point of view of a teenage girl.

I’ve been using the same I Ching since I was teenager when it was given to me by a fellow teenager; it seems too late to change now. I don’t use it often, but when I do it really does help. You can fool yourself, but not the I Ching.

Lorrie Moore

Long before I started to write in earnest, Lorrie Moore taught me you could have a woman narrator who was funny and complex and even wrong-headed. She opened up a lot of space that me and a million other women rushed in to.

Studs Terkel

There’s no law against asking strangers about their lives and feelings, although sometimes it really feels like there is. This is the kind of thing I want to read all day long, on every aspect of life (and there’s more, Terkel collected oral histories on race, the great depression, movies and plays, etc.)

Ben Okri

I am a big fan of work in any medium that can take on death — being dead, being a soul — in a new way. It shares something with my favorite aspects of George Saunders in its matter of fact dealings with what might be considered supernatural.

Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle taught me that art isn’t this thing apart from your life, your embarrassing life as woman, girlfriend, person who longed — all that could be art if you were smart and elegant enough to notice what makes something interesting.

George Saunders

There is something George Saunders said in an interview that I re-read many times while writing my novel. It’s too long for here but basically: characters don’t have to be articulate to be full human beings. He does this so well and I plan on doing it well.

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Grand lists is a curated arts site specializing in books and movies selected by 100 public figures and celebrities, ranging from designers, musicians, artists, actors, performers and directors, to politicians, novelists, scientists and athletes.